father,
Manuel Garcia, and other celebrities. In my album she wrote, "Nei giorni
tuoi felici ricordati di Marie de Beriot," and the flourish appended to
the signature takes the shape of an apocryphal bird. For my father's
album, one of the completest of its kind, she composed an Allegretto, a
song which I believe has never been published.

The words, probably by herself, run thus:--

"Il est parti sans voir sa fiancee
Lorsque le bal etait pret a s'ouvrir;
Si pour une autre il m'avait delaissee,
Malheur a moi, je n'ai plus qu'a mourir."

It is dated July 16, 1836: she died on the 23rd of September following.

Thalberg was also a children's man. He was not much of a romp, but
always full of jokes, musical and otherwise. Interested as I was in the
outward appearance of my home pianists, I was duly impressed by
Thalberg's rigid appearance at the piano, contrasting as it did with the
lively ways of Liszt and others. He had trained himself to this truly
military bearing by practising his most difficult passages whilst he
smoked a long Turkish chibouk, the cup of which rested on the ground.

Another source of wonder, not unmixed with awe, was the bulky frame of
Lablache, the great singer. It was indeed a basso profondo which emerged
from the depths of his ponderous figure. The beauty of his voice, the
perfection of his style, and his unconventional deportment on the stage,
I learnt to appreciate in later years. I particularly recollect him as
Bartolo in Rossini's "Barbiere," on an occasion when Sontag and Mario
took the other leading parts. As a small boy I just liked to walk round
him, and thought the hackney-coach driver, as they called the cabby
then, was not far wrong when he inquired whether his fare expected to be
conveyed in one lot.

One of the friends of those early days was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His
father was giving my elder sisters Italian lessons, and that led to most
friendly intercourse with him and his two sons. I mention Gabriel's name
with a twinge of regret, for the chief records of that intercourse, a
number of drawings by his hand, are irretrievably lost. There were--I
see them still--knights in armour, fair ladies, and graceful pages, bold
pen-and-ink drawings, illustrating a story that ran through several
numbers of our own special paper the "Weekly Critic." What, or by whom
the story was, I do not recollect, probably by Chorley, who was a
frequent contributor to that weekly pub